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"I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck."
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"Trying to educate the dumb with a dumb teacher is nothing but washing the dirty clothes in a dirty water!"
Author Name
Personal Development

"All that is necessary for a student is access to a library."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Math is a hard subject.... - no silence from you and skipping this and going to the next quote, didn't you done this?"
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Personal Development

"People should train their brain by watching films, by listening music, by playing games, by reading quotes. If people do this, I can said from this a big percent from here you can become clever."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Even the names of the books gave me food for thought."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Use two-way communication on oral exams to check the students' knowledge, not their attitudes. Checking attitudes can lead to the slippery area of subjective assessment."
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Personal Development

"Intellectual capacity is a precondition for becoming a man of knowledge."
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Personal Development

"Knowledge is responsibility, which is why people resist knowledge."
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Personal Development

"That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child."
Author Name
Personal Development

"They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing."
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Personal Development
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"If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal."
Alienation


"I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck."
Education


"As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that."
Privacy


"He laughed and the others laughed with him, except Babe, who resented slightly that what he felt so deeply could be reduced to a humor."
Humor


"But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody'd written 'fuck you' on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them- all cockeyed naturally- what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it."
Protection


"One of the few things left in the world, aside from the world itself, that sadden me every day is an awareness that you get upset if Boo Boo or Walt tells you you're saying something that sounds like me. You sort of take it as an accusation of piracy, a little slam at your individuality. Is it so bad that we sometimes sound like each other? The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose... For us, doesn't each of our individualities begin right at the point where we own up to our extremely close connections and accept the inevitability of borrowing one another's jokes, talents, idiocies?"
Interdependence


"Her sample drawings were clipped, rather subordinately, to her photograph. All of them were arresting. One of them was unforgettable. The unforgettable one was done in florid wash colors, with a caption that read: 'Forgive Them Their Trespasses.' It showed three small boys fishing in an odd-looking body of water, one of their jackets draped over a 'No Fishing!' sign. The tallest boy, in the foreground of the picture, appeared to have rickets in one leg and elephantiasis in the other--an effect, it was clear, that Miss Kramer had deliberately used to show that the boy was standing with his feet slightly apart."
Symbolism


"Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that."
Cities


"When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."
Mortality


"I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes."
Relationship
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